Principal ML Engineer - AI Security & Scalable Cloud

Palo Alto Networks, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 156,000 - 253,000; Full time

Job summary

Palo Alto Networks is building a new AI security platform initiative on the AIRS team in Santa Clara, CA, focusing on state-of-the-art AI/ML infrastructure and high-performance distributed backends. Senior leaders will drive architecture for Sr. Staff, Principal, and Sr.

Principal roles in a hybrid on-site setup. You will work as an AI/ML Engineer at the forefront of safeguarding cloud infrastructure and AI model implementations, deploying autonomous solutions to classify threats and prevent

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field with 8+ years software engineering experience, including 3+ years ML/NLP/AI systems.
• Strong Python coding and hands-on ML frameworks (PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• Experience with LLMs/SLMs, prompt engineering, and model fine-tuning.
• Experience building scalable auto-classification and anomaly detection models on large datasets.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable anomaly detection pipelines for cloud environments and AI agent actions.
• Lead SLM tuning for low-latency, high-accuracy edge-cloud security tasks.
• Drive data classification using ML, NLP, and deep learning on massive datasets to extract threat patterns.
• Collaborate with product, security, and cloud engineering to productionize ML solutions.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LLMs/SLMs

NLP

Auto-classification

Anomaly detection

Security concepts

Education

MS/PhD in CS

Tools

GCP

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Palo Alto Networks is building a new AI security platform initiative on the AIRS team in Santa Clara, CA, focusing on state-of-the-art AI/ML infrastructure and high-performance distributed backends. Senior leaders will drive architecture for Sr. Staff, Principal, and Sr.

Principal roles in a hybrid on-site setup. You will work as an AI/ML Engineer at the forefront of safeguarding cloud infrastructure and AI model implementations, deploying autonomous solutions to classify threats and prevent